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How Data Collaboration Opens a World of Possibilities for Marketers

For several years now, the world has operated in an increasingly global marketplace. As a result, many industries have become more interdependent and hypercompetitive, including retail, CPG, travel and hospitality, among others.

This has led to the rise of collaborative partnerships among peers (and sometimes even rivals) in an effort to combat disruption and integrate the value chain. According to a recent Winterberry Research report, 70% of surveyed executives in the U.S. and U.K. are either currently collaborating with other organizations to share first-party data or have plans to start.

Typically, any data collaboration activity—whether intracompany or intercompany—is built on a foundation of trust. Cultivating partnerships, establishing trust and achieving a mutual benefit can take a significant amount of time, and sometimes leads marketers to throw good money after bad.

However, as the technology landscape is evolving, collaboration is as well. Next-generation technology that protects data, restricts its movement, and governs access and usage eliminates many of these historical concerns and allows for greater scale across partnerships. When data owners can retain ownership and have clear control at all times, more possibilities become reality.

In retail, for example, ecommerce data often exists entirely separate from data generated by in-store operations. Imagine what insights merchandisers could glean if they were able to analyze transactions and other pertinent data across the full customer journey?

3 types of collaboration and their value

To broaden thinking on data collaboration across every industry, it’s helpful to categorize potential partners by what you mutually want to achieve:

Staunch competitiveness, even among divisions, has long been a barrier to collaboration—but not anymore.

Innovative collaboration: This is a partnership between companies that may not have obvious audience overlap and association, which is what makes it attractive. Partnering offers a chance to unlock new insights about your mutual consumers that you may not have otherwise discovered. For example, if you’re an automotive brand, you may want to partner with a big box retailer to uncover shopping insights that will help you curate new messaging.

Transactional collaboration: This restricted type of collaboration can help eliminate blind spots in the customer journey. From a data science perspective, this usually involves analysis of fixed predefined queries over fixed taxonomies. While the potential for uncovering new insights may be low, the value of the aggregated responses may still provide insights to improve customer experiences. One example is how restaurant groups and QSRs partner with delivery companies to spot macrotrends in inventory and resource planning.

Extensive partnership collaboration: This is a highly trusted collaboration among equals with a strong business case for working together. Retailers and CPG companies, as an example, may enter into partnership collaborations to boost customer intelligence, reveal product affinities and optimize a shared go-to-market strategy. Over time, this strategic relationship can boost customer lifetime value and improve loyalty in the long term.

Staunch competitiveness, even among divisions, has long been a barrier to collaboration—but not anymore.

Using a secure safe haven for data collaboration, transaction and media data can be brought in from partner networks and used to develop valuable business insights to grow customer intelligence. Even within highly regulated industries, marketers can safely collaborate to illuminate more of the customer journey and measure marketing activities with greater efficiency and accuracy. It also allows marketers to test less obvious partners they may have shied away from because of the time needed to determine the value.

Why privacy-enhancing technology helps make it all possible

Leaders know that decisiveness does not always require sacrifice. Trends around privacy-enhancing technology and greater data utility make it possible for global leaders to choose paths that will truly elevate the business, without compromises.

To make collaboration both easier and safer, marketers and analysts are using a number of privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) to ensure data collaboration maintains strict consumer privacy standards while allowing data analysis of key measures, such as return on advertising spend (ROAS).

PETs represent an ever-growing group of technologies that help companies comply with data regulations and partner requirements around using data. Along with adapting a privacy-by-design architecture built on consumer choice, transparency and control, an enterprise can better orchestrate intercompany and intracompany collaboration across clouds, seamlessly and in a privacy-conscious manner.

Enabling data collaboration today means working with partners who understand how to maximize the value from data without compromising privacy, unlock opportunities across the enterprise and transform customer experience into competitive advantage. With so much existing opportunity available to today’s executives, anything less should be considered unacceptable.